John Pastore's Message

Thank you for the opportunity to send a message to be read
at the dinner in DC starting the two year long celebration of the founding of
Physicians for Social Responsibility.

I suppose that I am a rarity among the PSR membership,
because I came to the national organization some time after having
been recruited to be one of the first Board members of IPPNW! From
the first, I was welcomed into PSR by its very experienced leadership
in those heady days in the early 1980's, and I got to learn the rich
history of PSR from Vic Sidel, Jack Geiger, Sid Alexander, and many other
stalwarts in the national organization. We certainly could not have gotten the
cooperation of the physicians from the then Soviet Union
if it weren't for those powerful American voices for nuclear weapons abolition.
Together with them, our small band of IPPNW leaders -- Bernard Lown, Jim Muller,
Eric Chivian, Herb Abrams, David Greer, and I -- felt that we could take on
anything -- including the daunting task of ridding the world of nuclear
weapons.

John Kennedy famously spoke of "the torch {having
passed} to a new generation", but it seems to me that what is needed
now is that we sharethe torch with a new generation
of young physicians and medical students. What would be most powerful is
the combination of historic memory and experience that many of us older
physician activists have with the youthful exuberance and idealism of this
new generation of physicians.

One need look no farther than the front pages of today's
newspapers to recognize that the warnings we in PSR have given for decades
about the production of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons need
reinforcement by a new membership of youthful physicians. While
celebrating the glorious past of PSR, we should also focus on the vision
of what is to come, when finally we will have achieved with physicians of all
ages what has always been our goal, a world without nuclear weapons.